The Free Press
There are 603 people in my mom and dad’s tiny town in East Texas, and my parents don’t even live in it—not really. Their house is outside the city limits, three miles down a road bearing the initials of my grandma’s grandpa, who died young, poor, and unable to write his own first name. On either side of the cracking asphalt there’s a national forest, until you hit a curve and see pasture—the farmland our family carved out of the woods nearly 200 years ago. The only people who brave this winding, pothole-dotted road are the eight people who live on it—I’m related to seven of them—and one person who doesn’t: the mail lady, who happens to be the preacher’s wife.
She’s employed by the United States Postal Service, which the president wants to turn into a business—even though there is absolutely no capitalist case for what the preacher’s wife does.
In her Jeep—rural mail carriers use their personal vehicles—she drives down roads like my parents’, delivering last-notice bills, birthday cards, and Amazon packages. She has done this for 20 years. Once, over a decade ago, I heard her whisper to an old lady in the pew behind her: “You wouldn’t believe the old men in this town who order dirty magazines.” The preacher’s wife knows the sins, debts, and online shopping habits of everybody in my parents’ town, but luckily for them she’s no gossip. At least by Baptist standards.
People quite like her.
Which is a damn good thing, because it’s not like they have any other options. UPS doesn’t deliver to my parents’ town, not even in the city limits. Nor does Amazon. Nor FedEx. It is not—and never will be—profitable to send mail to people who live nearly 150 miles away from the closest airport. Anything sent to my parents through any of these companies will be rerouted to the town’s tiny post office—and therefore, the preacher’s wife—for what’s called “last mile” delivery.
Delivering to millions of rural Americans, like the ones who raised me, often comes at a financial loss. But the USPS does it anyway, because of what’s called the “universal service obligation,” which requires—by law—that mail be delivered to all U.S. residents, at affordable prices, no matter where they live.
Last year, the USPS’s losses amounted to $9.5 billion.
President Trump objects to this. “We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money,” he has said. His administration is pushing to privatize the USPS, an effort led by Elon Musk, who told a tech conference earlier this month, “We should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized.” He’s supported by libertarians at places like the Cato Institute—who, frankly, would support privatizing the postal service even if it were profitable, because they’re ideologically committed to free market absolutism.
But delivering the mail is a public service. It shouldn’t have to make money.
If the federal government had written a check to cover the USPS’s losses last year (it didn’t), such a payment would have amounted to 0.14 percent of the federal budget—a rounding error at the Pentagon. The measly cost could be justified even if Americans hated the postal service, but they do not. It is the second most popular federal agency after the National Park Service—because unlike most government institutions, the USPS more or less functions as advertised. In a country where the government can’t get anything done, the mail still comes every day.
That matters, especially in rural communities like my parents’, for whom the USPS is the only real option for sending and receiving mail. Consider Aniak, population 488, a remote village in western Alaska that was profiled by Business Insider in 2020. Accessible only by boat or plane, it is absolutely unprofitable for the USPS to deliver anything to Aniak—and yet, the USPS does deliver, offering the town its only material link to the outside world. Through the postal service, the residents of Aniak get their kids’ school supplies, their groceries, and their lifesaving prescription medications. A USPS operating on market principles would not adequately serve these Americans—and as a result, they wouldn’t have access to medicine the average citizen can buy at their local CVS.
The government is not a business, even if it is currently run by two businessmen, and the lives of rural Americans should not be sacrificed on the altar of market ideology.
Is there something the government could actually do to help here?
Well, to get technical for a minute, the losses aren’t just attributable to the fact that fewer and fewer Americans are purchasing the USPS’s products and their associated goods: stamps, envelopes, postcards. They’re also attributable to federal rules that force the USPS to invest 100 percent of its pension fund into Treasury bonds, which yield essentially zero profit—the fund actually lost money, in real terms, in both the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years. The pension fund would have yielded a surplus if it had been invested better, according to the USPS inspector general’s report. Yet common sense changes to the pension program—supported by the postal workers union—have not been made. It’s not clear why.
Also, Trump, Musk, and others who are so suddenly concerned with the USPS’s financial issues should think carefully about the knock-on economic effects of privatizing it. Shipping to certain areas could become prohibitively expensive. E-commerce companies could lose millions of customers who live in rural areas. Small businesses in remote parts of the country would lose the ability to sell their goods online without charging outrageous shipping fees. The country would be less materially connected, and potentially less prosperous.
A government that bails out banks and lines the pockets of billionaire defense contractors should not feel squeamish about occasionally and incidentally subsidizing the shipping costs of an eBay seller in rural North Dakota or doling out a few bucks to make sure somebody’s grandma in Wyoming gets her heart medication in the mail. The USPS doesn’t have to be profitable; it just has to get my mom’s birthday gift to her house. I don’t care if it costs a minuscule fraction of my tax bill, because when the preacher’s wife puts the box by my mom’s front door, it will have meant the government did the thing I paid them to do, for once in my life. This is a nearly 250-year-old basic public service—and maintaining it is the least the government can do for its citizens. We shouldn’t even have to ask.
For another view on the postal service, read Chuck Lane’s piece, “Is It Time to Privatize the USPS?”